Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 15

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 15 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, LAs, English regions
Slides & data UK govt pressers
UK added daily by PHE & DHSC
PHE Surveillance report infections & watchlists every Thursday with sep. infographic
ONS England infection surveillance report
ONS UK death stats each Tuesday
ECDC rolling 14-day incidence EEA & UK
Daily ECDC country detail UK
Worldometer UK page
Plot FT graphs compare countries deaths, cases, raw / million pop
Covidly.com world summary & graphs
Plot COVID Graphs Our World in Data test positivity etc

We welcome factual, data driven, and civil discussions from all contributors 📈 📉 📊 👍

Perhaps it's the hot weather - but I can get pretty annoyed recently and the failure to close the places having major outbreaks is totally stupid The town may have to go into complete lockdown, with major impacts on a lot of businesses, to protect M&S sandwiches.

If a business is supplying dodgy food it can be closed immediately to protect consumers. Where are the powers to close a factory? Any legal people want to comment on whether small businesses could sue M&S for keeping the place open?

We can all buy other sandwiches FFS, yes it's daft.

Who is responsible for the biased summary of the care home report out of interest? I'm off to see if the original commented on visitors.

Parts of Northants (first Kettering, currently Northampton, Wellingborough, Corby I think) have been advised to wfh if necessary, not meet other households, get tested if have symptoms, for a couple of weeks. However, IMO the message hasn't been posted terribly widely or well and few people seem aware.....

Place marking! Thanks for new thread.

Signed up to the messenger service, thank you for that.

It seems suspicious that they couldn't publish infection figures yesterday following news of the outbreak, and ahead of the announcement of further lockdown easing. Maybe I'm cynical.

Thanks to everyone on here for providing such valuable information.

I think they're trying to get on top of it, so they can announce the whole lot as a bulk as well as a decision on locking down the area (how hard). Anything less will just face frustrated questions.

To try and answer my own question - I think the government has power to close factories but probably only if they are not following government advice on being covid safe. So someone really needs to be looking at whether staff were not following the advice or if it is not good enough to prevent outbreaks.

Thanks

apple.news/AOzE71Ua3SJCUgoxpcmxvpA

Some nice solid stats in this with very open analysis.

m&S is saying it's employees behaviour outside the factory that is the problem. Well to use an old phrase they would say that, wouldnt they. This report of a manager's test in May is interesting. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-52531831

Why were there no case numbers reported yesterday?

@EmMac7 technical difficulties, "normal service" expected to resume today. That presumably is the new normal service. There was a message on the dashboard about it but that is no longer displayed this morning.

@NameChangeBingo

boys3 North East Lincolnshire has a very poor, white population. I think if you are rich enough to go skiiing, you are rich enough to live far, far away from Grimsby and Cleethorpes. I don't think it was initially seeded in the same way as many other places and following that, I don't think it had as much population movement. I think it may be being seeded currently, by the summer season in Cleethorpes. If Covid reaches the frozen food factories, they will be ripe for clusters to develop (close quarters, cold, noisy) as the people working in that area currently are quite disbelieving of its existence at all.

@NameChangeBingo I'd pretty much agree with all those points bar perhaps the one about current holiday visitors - not sure the evidence is clear on that one. However NE Lincs characteristics are not unique so we might expect areas with similar locations and characteristics to maybe have similarly low case levels. The limited number of other council areas with very low levels - both cumulative and current - have little in common with NE Lincs; hence my intrigue.

Completely agree about the food processing industry risk were it to really take hold there. Although again I presume that industry has also been operating throughout.

Today's ONS survey is out.

An estimated 28,300 people (95% credible interval: 19,000 to 40,700) within the community population in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19) during the most recent week, from 3 to 9 August 2020, equating to around 1 in 1,900 individuals.

Which is exactly the same as last week.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/14/government-quietly-drops-13m-covid-tests-from-england-tally

The government has quietly removed 1.3m coronavirus tests from its data because of double counting, raising fresh questions about the accuracy of the testing figures.

Apologies if it has been shared before but this PHE map provides weekly data by ward. It's really useful if you want to keep track of what's happening at a local level.

phe.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=47574f7a6e454dc6a42c5f6912ed7076

in terms of the Northampton outbreak we have of course been here (as in most likely that type of outbreak) before.

South Holland had massive surge in cases in the first half of May. With a weekly peak cases per 100,000 higher than anywhere else in England so far; that may of course change with Northampton. For simplicity I've assumed 300 confirmed cases in Northampton this week; it could of course be higher again, but also it likely that a decent minority of those confirmed at Glencore may live in neighbouring council areas.

South Holland as the graph shows took a few weeks to get under control, but has remained as quite low levels since then. Hopefully a similar grip can be applied in Northampton.

Different environments of course though. Population of 95,000 in South Holland as compared to 224,000 in Northampton; and Northampton would fit into the area of South Holland 9 times over. But this is the sort of outbreak that needs to be managed downward quickly - most of the current watched areas seem to be lingering on for weeks merging into months.

So whackamole can work?

actually looking at my own graph it still took 6 weeks to get SH down to the overall English level - and it has since then been well below the England figure may have been a tad optimistic

And if population density is an issue, the fact that Northampton is 6 x smaller in area is very relevant.

How quickly you get an outbreak under control depends on how well you contain it initially. In this case it may not have been properly controlled when the first person in the factory tested positive. It will now have spread through family and friends and out into the wider community. So more likely to be like Leicester (they've gone up again recently) coronavirus.data.gov.uk/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Leicester than the Isle of Anglesey or even Hereford. coronavirus.data.gov.uk/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Herefordshire,%20County%20of

Now it depends on whether there is a local lockdown, how fast they get additional testing capacity in there and persuade the asymptomatic to test.

When will people finally get it into their heads that you need to go in hard and fast for outbreaks in large risky settings! Once again I wish I was in New Zealand - real leadership, no dithering and their tracers have already reached a significant number of contacts.

Re the Greencore outbreak, the BBC report indicates there were infections in early May, so most likely it's been in the factory since then and not enough was done. Looks like a journalist needs to get hold of that one and find out what happened. And as far as the 20 outbreaks in Northants that the council can't reveal information about: honestly, I think I sometimes know more about the outbreaks in Australia than I do in the UK. Why the secrecy?

From today's Covid surveillance report: several areas including london and the Northwest are showing reduced levels of sero prevalence in blood donors. The report provides two possible reasons:-

1 donors over 70 are now included and they were prohibited from donating during lockdown
*
2 Waning immunity may also be a contributing factor to the reduced prevalence.*

One to watch in future reports as this may confirm that immunity can be lost in as little as three months.

The surveillance reports had some very interesting data today.

Firstly the spread in BAME populations was quite horrifying compared to others.
Are BAME people also more prone to catching it as well as from complications from the virus itself?

This really needs investigating. Both whether it's lifestyle, not enough translated information, jobs and working conditions.

Also noticed the antibody testing and the drops. I couldn't work out if this was because they are testing randomly, it's people being re tested so they can tell they've lost antibodies or something else.

Was very interesting to see the highest number of positive antibody tests was the 17-24 yr old age group. Maybe they are more asymptomatic than we realised statistically.

Exactly agree. Looking at DM you can really see this person went to hose shops. These schools etc.

Northants just shows what happens if you don't shut down/test properly